


Lethe

by starkraving



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Horror, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:20:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23903758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: Toland the Shattered is a fucker and this is a story about how much of a fucker he actually is. Also, Omar Agah was literally just a dude and it was fucked up what happened to him to. This is also a story about that. The last stand of Eris Morn's fireteam from the POV of the team asshole.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	Lethe

> **_“Toland cracked the rune, or led us to believe he did. I told him it was either that, or the Hive have a hell of a recipe for beer.” - Omar Agah_ **

“Beer,” Toland repeats.

“Oh yeah, definitely.” The Hunter is grinning. He seems pleased with himself but in the limited time Toland has had to know this one, he seems primarily pleased with himself as a default. Eris Morn is silently – through a complex procession of grimacing and abortive hand gestures – trying to ward off Omar’s opening salvo into conversation. But he won’t be deterred. He jerks his chin at the ruinous tome, laying open at your feet where it steams poison from its withered pages. He ignores the aura of sucking rot it emanates. “One or the other. Fifty-fifty chance.” 

Sai Mota, perched on rock some distance away from the stink of the ritual circle, giggles a little. Vell Tarlowe’s helmet is still on but even Toland suspect the Titan’s eyes are rolling – the seething burn of his Light ticking toward aggravation but colored, even so, with amusement. When Omar Agah talks it is generally that way: annoyance softened with amusement. His Light is such that it warms a room.

Eriana-3 swats Agah away from the spent ward circle. “Toland, do you have what you need?”

“Yes, yes. I see the way, Sunsinger.” Toland say so mildly, aware of Agah who sticks his tongue out at Eriana and bounds away to join Mota. She, sensing his approach, blinks away and the two Hunters dart out of the catacomb like riled cats to game of tag. Eris groans. “I see the cost.”

* * *

Toland lies awake, listening to the bright dreams of his companions. It’s odd after so long alone. Guardian thoughts burning like embers in the hearth. He would stretch a hand out over their skulls individually, gauge their strange contents one by one but he cannot. Eriana-3 sits awake with him. A golden-eyed sentinel, her thoughts are obscene and edged. He can feel them on the peripheral of himself, a thumb ceaselessly testing the blade of a chipped knife. Eriana thinks of vengeance. Eriana has palmed the fragmented pieces of a Wizard’s mind and incinerated the nightmarish portions in star fire. She enjoyed it. Perhaps it is the killing subroutine that runs deep within her, thinking of nothing else.

“You’re looking at me,” says Eriana.

“Your mind is loud.”

“I prefer my thoughts untampered.” Her bright eyes turn toward him. Neon paint, candy yellow, sunbursts from her right eye. Her Light is nuclear inside her, the roiling guts of an ancient star. “I don’t imagine you will judge my trespasses.”

“Not me,” says Toland.

“You know, at times, you hardly seem mad.”

Toland has no grasp of Exo photo-lingual cues, so he cannot tell if the Warlock smiles. Her Light colors warmer, pulses lazily, content as a heartbeat. She must enjoy being this candid with another Warlock. It’s likely she mutes herself in the presence of other Warlocks to avoid prying eyes and unwanted admonitions. She wears her hatreds openly enough without laying bare the dark tides of her memory. 

“Why did you choose Tarlowe?”

“Because he is worth ten Titans of his Order. Because he’s afraid of nothing.”

“Why did you choose Mota?”

“Because she will find us our prey if you do not. Eris and she, together, are unstoppable.”

“And Agah?”

“He’s the brightest of his cadre. A dead shot even for his kind.”

“Friends and fools then.”

Eriana regards him coolly. “And you among them.”

“You ask Hunters and Titans with us. None of your own Order. None who know you the ways Warlocks know one another. I wonder why.”

“Continue to wonder.”

“Perhaps it should worry you, Eriana, that I do not seem mad.”

She looks toward the sleeping figures of the others, Sai and Eris curled together like small animals in a warren, arms looped around one another, breathing slow and in sync. Agah with a blade in hand, lying with it pillowed beneath his head, his back to Sai’s, their spines touching and curving away from one another. Tarlowe still in his full armor sits up against the wall as though he were watching over the three Hunters. His snoring is audible even through the helmet.

“They are brave,” says the Exo.

“And quick to your cause,” says Toland.

She looks at him, sharply. “As are you.”

“Yes, but I know what I face. I know _better_.”

“What are you saying?”

“That we are willing to pay the cost. That’s all.”

“We all are, Toland.”

“Good to know.”

* * *

“I can do it,” says Agah.

“No,” says Tarlowe, not looking away from the cluster of Hive acolytes down the steep cliff side.

“You know I can.”

“Or we can do something entirely less stupid.”

“You _love_ stupid.”

“If that were true, I’d like you a hellava lot more, wouldn’t I?” 

“Let him do it,” says Morn. “If he gets himself killed, we’ll scrape him up when we come through less directly.” A beat. The hive below continue to prowl in and out of the rocks and crevasses far below. “Besides, you’re only saying no because you can’t think of a way to do it yourself.”

Tarlowe considers this. “Fine, send the whelp.”

Agah presses the pad of his middle finger to the mouth of his helmet and flips the bird at Tarlowe. It may say something about Tarlowe that this only endears the little bastard to him – the noisy pitch of his mood spiking toward admiration. Then Agah is gone, bounding down from the high ground in weightless arcs and hops. With a Gunslinger’s fleet footedness, he moves erratic and the team Bladedancers peer curiously after their brother in arms. A Gunslinger’s skill is subtle – probability and blind faith. Toland hears Agah inhale through the still open radio, steadying himself. Then he hits the last ledge and launches, flips, hand canon pointed straight down and Toland can feel it – that Agah closes his eyes when he pulls the trigger fifteen times.

He hits the ground among fifteen moldering corpses, their skulls blown apart.

“Stop dancing, you little ingrate!” yells Tarlowe down the incline.

“Nope.” Agah is indeed doing some kind of hoppy victory dance on the Hive dead. He picks up a skull and hurls it into the ground in what Toland can only assume is evocative of Golden Age sporting rituals. He throw up two fists. “Eat it, Tarlowe!”

“Bah!”

“Light of the Traveler _brims_ in that one,” says Eris Morn.

Tarlowe snorts as he follows Agah down the hill. “He’s full of something alright.”

* * *

“So you’re still sure it’s not a beer recipe?”

Agah has crept from where the others are sleeping to bother him. Toland cannot fathom why. He suspects it’s to do mostly with Morn telling him explicitly not to speak with him, as though the Hunter will say something to make him turn away from the mission. As though his reasons for being here are not as desperate as theirs. Agah crouches near, elbows draped over his knees and tugs the hood of his cloak down. Agah’s in Gravebreaker gear, save his right arm, a strange gauntlet fused of bone, a spine tracking down his arm in hooked vertebra. It… stirs when Toland casts his mind upon it.

“That is Ahamkara bone.”

He peers at his own shoulder, shrugs, “Yeah, she’s a bit noisy. Eriana says I should get rid of it.”

“She’s a fool then.”

“Hey, it did try to talk me into eating my own arm once.”

“That’s…. interesting.”

“Not the word I’d use, but it _was_ an interesting scar.”

“Why are you here, Agah?”

“Because you are Toland the Shattered.” Omar beckons with open arms, a theatrical fling. “He of legendary bad juju, fuckery, and frankly kind of ridiculous legend. Be kinda dumb not to get your story while I can.”

Toland ignores that last part and squints. “Bad juju?”

Omar pulls his helmet off. He’s human, short Mohawk, white war paint on earthy complexion, as handsome as his ritual cockiness infers. He presents himself as a young man still, a habit Toland has centuries past outgrown. There are tattoos, bands of script running up from Omar’d spine over the back of his head, a cenotaph he cannot readily decipher. Wonder if he had them before he was forged in Light or if he’s like others – stubbornly inking their ever dying bodies. Trying to give illusion of permanence. 

“Yeah,” he says, grinning a bright grin. “Also heebie-jeebies and bad vibes. So, do you live up to your hype or is it mostly bullshit?”

Toland tilts his head. “What do they say about me?”

“That you’re the reason Yor went mad.” When Toland does not immediately go for this baited hook, he adds, “Yor read your research. All the stuff you wrote about the Hive, before anyone stopped you and locked it up, before they spaced you from the City. They say that’s why he made the gun.” He says ‘gun’ in a whisper. “They say what you put down set him on that path.”

“And do you believe that?”

“Eris and Eriana think you know how to bring down Crota. They’re smarter than me.”

“But what you do _believe_?”

“That ideas are dangerous and you had some really fucked up ideas.”

From the other side of the camp there’s a stirring and Omar glances over his shoulder and in that moment, when his head is turned, there’s an instant where he doesn’t think of the Warlock and where Toland, in turn, considers that laconic instant where he could reach out, fingers sheathed in Void-blade no thicker than an atom, and open the canal of his jugular. But the thought passes, as it always does, and Toland waits.

Omar murmurs, unintelligible until Toland registers he’s speaking, off-hand, in Arabic.

He’s wondering aloud what that was.

It’s Mota shifting in her sleep. Toland knows without looking, knows Morn is keeping a distracted third watch, that Tarlowe is having a nightmare so violent it possesses him entirely, that Eriana has wandered from the central portion of the abandoned moon base where the rest slumber. Maybe Omar has some sense of it. Maybe he does not – of the discord, the thin thread of madness and nobility that stitches their company together. Agah was not there when Crota took the moon. He did not see Wei Ning die, her shorn corpse crushed beneath Hive armies. He did not hear the battle songs or the screams of the dying. He didn’t watch a god walk this plane.

 _It would be kinder…_ Toland thinks, or perhaps it’s his Ghost. His Ghost says such strange things these days.

“I’ve made a rifle.”

Omar, startled by this sudden profession, turns to blink at him, warily, “What?”

“No, not like Yor’s. The path he walked had a single end.”

“No one will say what happened to him.”

“He became something else.”

“What?”

“The first of his name.”

“My Ghost says your Ghost won’t talk to any of the others.”

“We don’t keep company very well. Do you want to see it?”

“What? The rifle?”

“Yes.”

He hesitates, a long moment passing in silence and suspicion. Hunter curiosity and, perhaps, ego ultimately wins out. He grins to mask his moment’s uncertainty.

“Sure. Show me.”

In the dark, as Agah looks on, Toland unbinds it from the warding seals. He unwraps it from strips of Wizard rag scribed with acolyte ash and it bleeds malcontent like a wound. The rifle belonged to a dead Guardian, a Hunter in fact, flayed alive by Wizards who laid claim to his weaponry only long enough to contaminate its mechanisms. When taken in hand, the fetal Ahamkara skull affixed to its front pulses poisonously, fuming a mirage of toxic wavelength so dense even a non-Guardian can see the nimbus. Agah shudders.

“It’s cold,” he says.

“What is?”

“You don’t feel that?”

“What do you feel?”

“Like that gun would take root in my fucking wrists if I tried to hold it.”

An impulse comes, sudden, violent. “You can use it if you like.”

“ _What_?”

“The rifle, Agah. Do you want it? You can have it.”

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“Yes. Do you want to have it?”

“No, you lunatic. Why do you think I _want_ it?”

“We go to the Temple tomorrow. Are you strong enough as you are?”

“Fuck off.”

“You asked about Yor.”

“So what?”

“You remind me of him.”

It’s there, for a second, the flicker of wonder at the comparison, the microburst of elation – “ _You remind me of him._ ” – before sanity reclaims its ground. Omar stands up and puts his helmet back on, smoothly, easily, like his pulse hasn’t quickened, like the radiance of his Light hasn’t constricted in on itself like a clenched fist. He turns his back, moves toward Mota and Tarlowe but pauses a moment to glance back at the Warlock. For a half of a half of a second, there’s that hesitation.

Then: “You can keep your bad Juju to yourself, Toland.”

Agah leaves him behind to lie down with Mota, but will not actually fall asleep until hours later. Even then, it’s a fitful sleep roiled with nightmares.

* * *

Vell Tarlowe is torn apart.

It happens fast. The team pushes through the temple doors – a feat, truly, for a team composed so raggedly and from such desperation – and into the inner chamber. The Hunters wink from view and in seconds Mota and Morn have emptied the room, Agah stopping at the top of descending stairs to cover Tarlowe’s retreat. It is no fault of anyone that the ground splits beneath the Titan’s feet. Perhaps it was Tarlowe’s error not to see Verok’s hissing thrall as it rises, screaming, not a blind thing. Not one of the horde. The witch’s familiar – seething her adamantine will, bleeding putrefaction – it lunges from the crack she splits in dimension and buries its fangs deep into Tarlowe’s neck.

The witch shrieks in pleasure, arches, and sings.

The Thrall rips the Titan’s throat out like a root system.

Agah catches flame and puts a bullet-sized supernova into the skull of the thrall, then two into the screaming witch. But as the bullet finds its mark – too late, far too late – the rest of the swarm boils forward over the body. Tarlowe disappears beneath a carpet of chitinous corpses. Mota is the only one fast enough to reach him when he darts out from cover and charges back up the steps toward the temple door. She catches him halfway; snatches his elbow and yanks him back.

“ _No_!”

“She has his Ghost!” He thrashes against her grip, but Mota is strong, her discipline’s titanium grounding. She yanks him down behind a jut of stone just in time to avoid a rib-bursting shot of acolyte plasma. They grapple but Mota, a Bladedancer, pins him in seconds beneath her. He squirms. “We have to get it back!”

“They’re gone, Agah!”

“If we get the Ghost we can bring him back!”

Mota pins him again and says something, her helmet pressed so close to his the hood of her cloak eclipses him briefly. She does not say it loud enough to hear over the battle roar but whatever she says gets him moving again. Verok hovers, swaying, chittering and screaming as the stone splits from the bloody stone where Tarlowe fell. In her fist she clutches the Ghost, one claw rammed through its single bright eye and even as they run, its screaming follows them down into the darkness.

* * *

“Something is watching us.” Eris speaks in a murmur so soft it’s almost thought, not speech. She shifts slightly, brushing her arm against Toland’s “I can feel it”

Omar looks up from where he’s hunkered in the dark. “I hate when you say that.”

They’ve been separated from Eriana-3 and Sai Mota for hours now. The crush of the abyss is great, the darkness pressing in like the depth of an ocean against them, a Mariana Trench of black and even here Toland knows this is not the true abyss. Of the two Hunters, Eris withstands it better. She is not smothering as quickly as her Gunslinger brother whose Light burns still but wanes steadily. She keeps touching his shoulder, as if to dispel some of the dark, to crack it and let Light bleed in.

Toland knows that she promised Sai Mota she would look after Agah. She promised.

“Crota has many Eyes.” Toland is not sure they’re listening. “Every god does.”

“We have to go.”

Omar shakes his head. “If they know our every move, what chance do we have?”

“With their great age comes even greater wisdom. I have no doubt the Hive led us here with intent.”

That catches their attention. Agah stares at him. “What are you saying?”

“For these disciples, we offer the greatest sacrifice.”

Eris seizes him then, fine steelboned finger hooking and holding the collar of his feildweave jacket, making a noose of his collar. “ _What_ does that _mean_?”

Toland remains conversational despite her grip, fist crackling with unformed lightning at his throat. “Do you feel your Light fading?” He lays a hand over Eris’ knuckles, gently, like he might gather her hand to his heart and she recoils immediately. He feels it though – the guttering of the Arc current within her, a dying charge. “They are offering it to Crota. Us coming here, we are the ones waking him.

Omar says, tiredly, “He’s mad.”

Toland shrugs. “Perhaps.”

She slams him up against the putrid wall, rotten slime layers cracking and oozing over his shoulders. At first, it seems she will crush his windpipe into his spine but she doesn’t. Her grip shakes but from force or fury or fear he cannot hazard – all three vibrate in her like a low chord. Behind her, Omar presses a palm to the side of his head and exhales unsteadily.

“Why do you hold these secrets like weapons, to damn us all?”

“Because they are weapons.” Toland remains patient. Their hysteria is not unexpected but it’s… inconvenient. He needs them to remain calm. He waits a moment to determine if Eris will spend the last of her Light stabbing him with an Arc Blade but she does not so he continues, “And we are going to use them to show the Hive they are not the only ones who breed fear.

“How?”

“You’re Hunters.” He gestures. “Hunt. Find the Eyes that are upon us.”

Omar, dully, says, “Then?”

“We blind Crota and use what’s left of your dying Light to lead us to where these monsters seek to conjure their master.”

* * *

It is difficult. Holding Omar down. He’s strong and his Light is not yet gone somehow. Persisting inside him, that same deep well, a new star burning.

Omar screams when Toland snap his wrist, screams again when he cuts the tendon at the back of his knee and he goes down in the Hive dust, blood darkening the tunnel floor. Toland snaps his other wrist just to be sure. Guardians only need one hand to be deadly. Omar only needs one hand, a single clean shot with any projectile. So Toland opens a small hole in his lower abdomen, inside him, a miniscule scalpel cut in Void Light. He screams and doubles over, curling into himself and clutching the locus of his pain. He lies gasping, arms curled to his chest, grinding the visor of his helmet against the ground in agony.

While he’s in shock, Toland unholsters his sidearm and takes it. Rolls him onto his back and removes his belt, tugging it off to go through the pouches. He tosses it and its variety of poisons and blades away. He groans, half conscious, when Toland pats him down, discovering every knife and needle spirited under his armor, every small lethal vial. There can be no error here. If he finds a method of suicide he will lose his bargaining chip. Agah swipes at Toland when he pockets the Hunter’s dead Ghost.

“Stop fighting.”

He doesn’t of course. He rears back and kicks Toland in the stomach then tries to get up and run. His bad leg collapses immediately. To his credit, he doesn’t try to crawl away at least, just lies in the dark breathing hard, shoulders hunched. When Toland comes to kneel besides him he looks up, physically blind in the dark without his helmet, but Gunslingers like Omar don’t need to see to know where the world positions itself around them.

“What have you done?”

“Struck a bargain.”

“No.”

“I _am_ sorry. If I’d had my preference, it would be Morn here with me. When our party split… well…”

He doesn’t have the strength to recoil when Toland kneels down in front of him.

“What?”

“Your Light, living Light. In trade.” When he stares, speechless, elaborate. “The Heart of Crota can be bargained with, Hunter, if you know the ways of it.”

Horror has a tang. Acidic in the mind. “No.”

Toland grabs his arm, a thin miasma of Void Light still left in his fingers.

“You can’t. You’re still a Guardian. Your Ghost isn’t dead yet. _Toland_.” He takes Omar’s other arm, just below the fracture in his wrist. Omar is on his knees. His eyes in the dark are wide, bright, dilated, animal feverish. The Light slides under his skin, hot and gold, sizzles against the cold in Toland’s palms. “Your Ghost isn’t dead. We can still get out.”

“No. There is no going back now.”

* * *

When the Heart takes his Ghost, she pulls the tiny body like clay in her claws, flattens it into a blade. Omar doesn’t scream. He hyperventilates when she fashions an edge, serrated and dull. Bands of bone lash him at the waist to a berth of rotten mass and skeletal shards. She drifts, rag and bone, to his side and takes him by a broken wrist. She twists until he cries out, listening to the pitch of Omar’s cries. Then she pulls his bare arm up under the sickly lamp light. She gestures with the heinous blade.

“You are bound by the seal,” Toland says.

 _Yesssssss,_ the Heart says, placing the blade against Agah’s wrist. _Bound._

“Then give me what I ask.”

She chitters, clicking, and opens her mind like a rotten eye blinking wide and in that invisible gaze stares out the knowledge he seeks – beautiful and obscene. She reveals to him, also, what she is going to do next.

She opens Omar’s arm then. As she does, as the blood wells around the blade, the metal in her hand suddenly screams, once, aware for a single terrible instant of its new shape and purpose. Omar cries out not from the cut but to hear his dead Ghost’s voice so wretched, a howling shriek mad with despair. Then it dies again. Or perhaps it kills itself. Abandoning its Guardian rather than be an instrument of his torment. The Wizard casts the blade aside, disinterested now, but keeps its grip on the Hunter’s arm. Omar is hysterical.

“Toland! Toland _please_!”

“I will find the others.”

“ _Toland!”_

“You’ve bought time. We won’t forget.”

The Wizard is grabbing Omar’s jaw, corpse fingers digging into his face, bringing her own terrible features near. Omar screams finally in terror and the Wizard screams back, harmonizing to his voice and, terribly, through means Toland doesn’t understand, forces him to keep screaming long after his breath runs out. He _glows_ with agony, insanity spinning out from the animal terror, pulsing and flaring in terrible concert to the creature’s song. The last Toland sees: the witch lowering herself over him, covering him, his body jerking underneath her.

* * *

He tells Eris that he died in the fighting. That he was overrun, cut down, like Tarlowe. He also gives her the rifle. She does not ask its name but, oddly compelled, he tells her it’s called Bad Juju.

She doesn’t speak anymore, not really. But he feels her look at him.

“Someone else named it.”


End file.
